This book is the result of the "First Conference on Twentieth-Century Literature and Science", held in April 1991 in the Department of English and German Studies. It constitutes an approach to the complex relationship between science and literature as reflected in Anglo-American theorists, writers and filmmakers, and explores topics as diverse as natural theology, the new physics, Darwinism, empiricism, progress or reality, to name but a few. The book's scope ranges from Thomas Hardy to C.P. Snow and from Saul Bellow to Thomas Pynchon. This study's most remarkable achievement is its success in striking a happy balance between two disciplines that have all too often been presented as inimical to each other, and that are here eventually integrated.